Advice to CEOs from Other CEOs

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Situation: A CEO wants to increase brand awareness for her company and its primary service. The objective is to increase the client base and drive revenue growth. They have identified their primary growth opportunity and differentiating advantage. What else should they do? How do you increase brand awareness?

Advice from the CEOs:

What is lacking is a clear vision, path, and marketing plan. These are prerequisites to deciding either the solution or hiring a high caliber individual to execute the plan.

What steps are involved?

Survey 20% of current clients. Ask “why did you choose us?”

Develop the tools to track and show clients service performance online.

Use these same tools to show company performance online.

Tune messaging to potential clients to highlight demonstrated service performance.

Play elite – as the company’s name and reputation grow, clients should aspire to being accepted as clients.

Think long-term.

What is unique about the company’s ability to manage and extend the longevity of clients’ key assets?

How well prepared are potential clients to manage this on their own?

How does the company help potential clients to manage and extend the life of those assets?

Once there is a clear plan, fine-tune the internal focus of the company to align with the plan.

Increase involvement in communities where potential clients are found.

Situation: A company has a successful product, but the market is changing. Previous customers were savvy, but the market is shifting to more naïve customers who don’t understand how to use the product. How so you respond when the market for your product changes?

What you are seeing is a typical market evolution. (See Clayton Christensen’s book Crossing the Chasm.)

When a new product is introduced, early adopters are typically savvy users who quickly grasp the utility of the product. They don’t mind some inconvenience provided the product is useful.

As the market matures and starts to attract mainstream customers, new users will not be as sophisticated and expect the product to be easy to use.

If you don’t adapt to these new customers your product will languish as new competitors enter the market with user-friendly adaptations.

The path is clear. Figure out how to make your product easy to use. If you use a GUI (graphic user interface) make the GUI intuitive. Allow customers to get what they need with as few choices or clicks as possible.

These changes may alienate more sophisticated customers, but they usually only represent a small segment of your potential market.

Add a customer-friendly service component. This builds a service income base around the product. You have different options.

Align the customer with appropriate level of resource – you may not require high level resources to assist the customer, particularly if the product is one where the service consultant only needs to be one page ahead of the user.

Outsource the service component to a partner or use independent contractors.

Consider a remote monitor system:

A dashboard interface with easy to read visuals or messages that tell the customer when service is needed. This will enable them to perform simple maintenance using your tools, or alert them when they need to contact you for service.

An example is Norton’s evolving system of products that enables an unsophisticated home computer user to either use Norton tools to perform routine maintenance, or directs them to the Norton web site for assistance or more sophisticated solutions.

Situation: A company has two businesses in different locations serving different sets of customers in two separate markets. The CEO is evaluating whether it makes more sense to have one umbrella web site with pages for each of the two businesses, or to create two complete web sites with different URLs. How many web sites should a small business have, and why?

Advice from the CEOs:

The first question is whether you call both businesses the same or different names. Many small companies have separate businesses at different sites, and just differentiate the businesses through division names. Moreover, because you use the same company name for both businesses, you want to make it easy for customers to find your web sites. This argues for at least a single splash page, listed under your current company URL.

There are many corporations with diverse, unrelated businesses. Generally, these corporations don’t have any problem having a general web site, with separate links to the individual division web sites where customers and partners can drill down to detail specific to each division. The advantage to this strategy is that by having one corporate site, the larger entity strengthens its own market presence.

Given that the advice of the group is to have a single splash page how do you construct it?

You want to prominently feature your company name on the splash page, but not to include much detail. Maybe just an overall positioning message that expresses your core values or a distinctive visual that shows what you do.

On the splash page, create two links with distinctive pictures and names that enable your customer to easily go to the side of your business that interests them.